Automatic soap dispensers are known. Some known automatic soap dispensers can be activated by a person pushing a button with a user's hand. Other systems sense a user's hand as by with a photosensor and can dispense without the user touching the dispensers as, for example, illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 4,938,384 to Pilolla et al issued Jul. 3, 1990, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,836,482 to Ophardt et al, issued Nov. 17, 1998.
Washing a person's hands is becoming very important in the food and health industries. In some food industries, there is a legal requirement that workers wash their hands every 20 minutes. There is also a legal requirement that the persons wash their hands after every break or upon entering a clean room as in an operating room in a hospital. These legal requirements give rise to the disadvantage that employers should monitor that people are properly washing their hands to comply with health regulations and proper safety procedures, and to be able to provide evidence of compliance with such regulations and procedures.
Systems are known where a person punches his ID code into a keypad to operate the soap dispenser. Other systems are known where magnetic cards monitor the entry of persons into clean rooms and alert the user by a warning if that person does not then use the soap dispenser. However, the present applicant has appreciated that these systems suffer the disadvantage that persons can fool these systems by activating the soap dispenser yet merely permitting the dispenser to dispense soap without the soap having to come onto the person's hands and without the person washing their hands.
Dispensers are known which provide on a surface of a dispenser a fingerprint reader for engagement by a finger or thumb of a user's hand while the user's hand is ready to receive fluid to be dispensed. The present applicant has appreciated that such dispensers suffer the disadvantage is that the fingerprint reader bed is to be contacted by the user's finger or thumb which provides a possibility for contamination of the fingerprint reader bed by one user, and the possibility of transference of the contamination to a later user contacting the fingerprint reader bed.
Palm vein identification uses an individual person's unique vein pattern to identify an individual's palm as a sensitive biometric authentication technique. Palm vein identification is known which uses an infrared sensor to capture a user's vein pattern over the palm of a hand. A typical palm reader illuminates a user's palm with infrared light and then captures an image of the palm. Since the deoxidized hemoglobin in the vein vessels absorb at least portions of the infrared light, when the infrared ray image is captured, the blood vessel pattern containing the veins is visible as a series of dark lines. Using an extracted vein pattern image, software technology is known which compares and matches the extracted vein pattern with previously recorded vein patterns of individuals. Patents teaching palm print identification include U.S. Pat. No. 4,032,889 to Nassimbene issued Jun. 28, 1977 and published U.S. patent application US 2007/0206098 published Sep. 6, 2007.
Infrared thermometers are known to measure temperature using infrared radiation emitted from an object. One basic design comprises a sensor to sense infrared energy, preferably, with a lens to focus the infrared energy on the sensor. The sensor converts the energy to an electric signal that can be displayed in units of temperature after being compensated for ambient temperature variation. Such an infrared thermometer permits temperature measurement from a distance without contact of the object to be measured such as a user's hand. Non-contact infrared thermometers are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,797,840 to Fraden, issued Jan. 10, 1989 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,129,673 to Fraden, issued Oct. 10, 2000, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Screening of people to determine whether or not they may have a fever and thus may be considered to be suffering from an infectious disease such as the flu can be important in many situations as, for example, to segregate ill people from healthy people at work, in health care environments, at schools, at airports and the like. However, there is not presently a simple system which assists in screening people with fever.